Sherdog.com’s WMMA Pound-for-Pound Top 10

At 115 pounds, unbeaten fighters are staying unbeaten. At 135
pounds, no one can hang onto the
Ultimate Fighting Championship title. In either case, we've got
significant movement on the women's pound-for-pound list.

At UFC 201 in Atlanta, Karolina
Kowalkiewicz seized the moment, co-headlining a pay-per-view in
just her third UFC appearance in a de facto title eliminator
against the offensively gifted Rose
Namajunas. Kowalkiewicz took the clinch to exploit Namajunas,
earning a well-deserved split decision victory and solidifying
herself as the next challenger for fellow unbeaten Polish
115-pounder Joanna
Jedrzejczyk in a bout that would be both a historic strawweight
clash, as well as a new pinnacle for Polish mixed martial arts.
With her biggest win to date, Kowalkiewicz rises in these rankings
from 10th to fifth.

Of course, Kowalkiewicz's rapid rise through these pound-for-pound
rankings wouldn't have been possible without the events that
transpired one week earlier in Chicago, where underdog Valentina
Shevchenko outclassed former UFC women's bantamweight champ
Holly
Holm for the final four rounds to earn the biggest win of her
own career, leap forward in UFC 135-pound contendership and take
the seventh spot on our list.

Shevchenko's upset of Holm in conjunction with the rise of
Kowalkiewicz means that this women's pound-for-pound update says at
least a temporary farewell to a perennial staple of the list,
formerly ninth-ranked Jessica
Aguilar, who hasn't fought since dropping a one-sided decision
to Claudia
Gadelha last August and is still on the mend from an ACL tear
suffered earlier this year.

In the post-Ronda
Rousey era, Joanna
Jedrzejczyk is not just the sport's queen by default. It's not
even just that she's the dominant champion in the best women's MMA
weight class. It's that the undefeated Polish strawweight has come
to 115-pound supremacy with style, charisma and brutality, racking
up dominant wins over elite opposition. For the last three years,
even prior to her UFC debut, Jedrzejczyk has dominated an
outstanding cross-section of the top women's MMA division,
including a pair of wins over pound-for-pound stalwart and rival
Claudia
Gadelha. With a growing profile and hype surrounding her,
Jedrzejczyk is poised for an outstanding and unique title defense
next time out, as fellow unbeaten countrywoman Karolina
Kowalkiewicz -- whom Jedrejczyk submitted as an amateur back in
2002 – has firmed up herself as the division's top contender. Not
only does it give the UFC a readymade European main event, or a
high-level co-main event feature on a serious pay-per-view, it's a
stylistically appealing matchup given both women's high volume,
all-action styles. “Joanna Champion” is the sport's top woman and
now she's got the requisite challengers to start having
historically significant bouts.

The song remains the same for Cyborg's pound-for-pound status.
She's been the most dangerous and dominant woman in MMA for a
decade and along the way has thrashed the likes of Gina Carano,
Marloes
Coenen (twice), Hitomi
Akano, Leslie
Smith and Daria
Ibragimova. The fly in the ointment is, as always, that
“Cyborg” is physically best suited to 145 pounds, 10 pounds north
of where there is truly elite talent. After a successful and
much-anticipated UFC debut against Leslie
Smith at UFC 198 last May, in front of 45,000 fans in her
native Curitiba, Brazil, Justino is now lined up for a second
Octagon appearance, where she will headline Sept. 24's UFC Fight
Night card in Brazil's capital, Brasilia, against 6-1 upstart Swede
Lina
Lansberg in a 140-pound catchweight bout. The 31-year-old
Brazilian also remains the Invicta FC featherweight champion and
the emergence of Australian prospect Megan
Anderson also may provide her with a worthwhile and intriguing
foil. While it's a far cry from Justino taking on Ronda
Rousey or Miesha Tate,
there is reasons to be optimistic about the competition available
to “Cyborg.”

Now 6-1 in her Octagon tenure, the new UFC women's bantamweight
champion has looked sensational since her September 2014 stoppage
loss to former title challenger Cat Zingano.
Since that defeat, Nunes has destroyed Shayna
Baszler and Sara McMann,
topped new pound-for-pound entrant Valentina
Shevchenko, which is even more impressive in hindsight, then
ran roughshod over a pound-for-pound staple in Miesha Tate
to take the UFC title in the main event of UFC 200. Not a bad run,
to say the least. The American Top Team rep continues to improve
and expand on her natural physical gifts, making her one of the
most devastating finishers in MMA. However, Ronda
Rousey is perhaps the most dynamic woman in MMA history and
with her fall just nine months ago, we've seen three new women's
bantamweight champions in the UFC. Whether Nunes' first title
defense comes against “Ultimate Fighter” winner Julianna
Pena or it's a rematch with Shevchenko, the real test for “The
Lioness” will be to defend her throne and try to bring a
post-Rousey consistency to 135 pounds.

As women's MMA continues to evolve and emerge, it is an unfortunate
consequence that many outstanding competitors will be thrust into
competitively, promotionally undesirable circumstances, which is
exacly where Claudia
Gadelha now finds herself. The 27-year-old Nova Uniao product
is dynamic, well-rounded, a gifted bilingual talker and sports
quality wins over 105-pound queen Ayaka
Hamasaki, longtime divisional elite Jessica
Aguilar, former UFC title challenger Valerie
Letourneau, former Invicta FC champ Herica
Tiburcio and the vastly underrated Kalindra
Faria. However, Gadelha has now lost to rival and divisional
champion Joanna
Jedrzejczyk twice in less than two years and “Joanna Champion”
is showing no signs of slowing up. In spite of clearly being one of
the very best women in all of MMA, “Claudinha” is now in the
uneviable “awesome second fiddle” position, past suffered through
by Antonio
Rodrigo Nogueira under Fedor
Emelianenko's reign, Jon Fitch after
being downed by Georges St.
Pierre, and more recently, Joseph
Benavidez after being knocked cold by Demetrious
Johnson in their rematch. Gadelha will be a healthy favorite
against any woman in the division other than the champ, so it's
seems a mortal lock that she'll continue to add elite contenders to
her hit list, but in order to get another title shot, she'll either
need to pray for Jedrzejczyk to be upset or put together a long,
gaudy win streak and leave the UFC no other choice but a third
fight with the Polish star.

Since turning pro in May 2012, Karolina
Kowalkiewicz has been flawless and in under the last two years,
she's soundly beaten five quality opponents. After deserved split
decisions over two very underrated fighters in Japan's Mizuki
Inoue and Brazil's Kalindra
Faria, Kowalkiewicz brought her act to the UFC and dominated
Randa
Markos and Heather Jo Clark to lopsided verdicts. In her most
recent outing, Kowalkiewicz used her savvy clinch game to overwhelm
contender Rose
Namajunas and firm herself up for a showdown with
pound-for-pound ruler and UFC strawweight champ Joanna
Jedrzejczyk, who choked out Kowalkiewicz as an amateur, two
months before she turned professional. The bout is not only an
outstanding pairing of undefeated action fighters, but a testament
to Poland's outstanding contributions to the sport of MMA. Last
November's KSW 33 bout between Mamed
Khalidov and Michal
Materla is to date the biggest fight in Polish history, but a
Jedrzejczyk-Kowalkiewicz showdown has much higher stakes and
historic ramifications, especially if it's staged in Poland.

Miesha
Tate is a pound-for-pound staple because more often than that,
she outscraps and outscrambles her opponents in rugged fights; that
is not a recipe for consistent dominance. This came to bear in the
main event of UFC 200, where less than four months removed from
upsetting Holly Holm
for the UFC women's bantamweight title, Tate was absolutely torn
apart by Amanda
Nunes on the feet before being tapped in just over three
minutes. Still, “Cupcake” has taken out Marloes
Coenen, Liz
Carmouche, Rin Nakai,
Sara
McMann, Jessica Eye
and of course, Holm, in the last five years. Given the state of
flux at 135 pounds, Tate's days on this list might be numbered
especially with the emergence of new talent at bantamweight, but
the Washington native has always seemed to bounce back with big
victories at critical junctures in her career to restate her elite
status.

After a highly distinguished kickboxing career which features three
wins over pound-for-pound queen Joanna
Jedrzejczyk, Shevchenko didn't begin to more seriously dedicate
herself to MMA until three years ago. Since then, she's 6-1 and has
gone 2-1 in the UFC in less than eight months and the worst thing
you can say about her is that she lost the first two rounds of a
three-round fight to the new divisional champ, Amanda
Nunes. Her upsets of Sarah
Kaufman and Holly Holm
were masterful performances where “Bullet” used her outstanding
counterstriking and savvy clinch techniques to outclass her
opponents. With her network TV main event win over Holm, Shevchenko
is a leading candidate to face Nunes in the Brazilian's first title
defense and even if Shevchenko doesn't get the rematch, she's no
more than one more win away from that shot. Not bad for a fighter
who is more of a traditional flyweight.

Think about this: if a child was conceived the night that Holly Holm
took the UFC women's bantamweight title from Ronda
Rousey in Melbourne, Australia, that child probably wouldn't be
born yet. We are less than nine months removed from the events of
UFC 193 and yet “The Preacher's Daughter” seems like an
afterthought now, having been upset for the title at UFC 196 in
March by Miesha Tate,
then being outpointed in tidy fashion by Valentina
Shevchenko in the UFC on Fox 20 headliner on July 23. While she
is 34 years old and has a historic boxing career already behind
her, there are no shortage of options for her in terms of UFC
opponents, with only five Octagon outings and only having faced a
small sample of the division's best. While her split decision wins
over Raquel
Pennington and Marion
Reneau were hardly inspiring, Holm's position on this list is
buoyed by one major fact: she authored the biggest, most
significant and perhaps most brutal win in women's MMA history.
Nonetheless, Holm's position in this list is increasingly tenuous,
even if her head kick on Rousey still isn't even nine months
old.

No one is going to forget how Ronda
Rousey lost her UFC women's bantamweight title any time soon;
her head kick knockout loss to Holly Holm
was instantly an all-time MMA moment and Rousey's massive celebrity
ensured that millions and millions the world over saw it. That
said, if and when Rousey returns to action, she will inevitably be
an imminent UFC bantamweight title threat, not just because the UFC
will be keen to put her in that position, but because she is still
the most dominant and dynamic women in the sport's history. Between
the lures of Hollywood and even discussing parenthood, it's
entirely possible that Rousey stays away from the cage for a while
longer yet, perhaps even long enough that she's no longer eligible
for these rankings. But, until that moment comes to pass, Rousey
remains the most achieved fighter in women's MMA history, with wins
over Miesha Tate
(twice), Sarah
Kaufman, Liz
Carmouche, Sara McMann,
Alexis
Davis and Cat Zingano,
and nearly all of them one-sided blowouts at that.

Years before coming stateside, Ayaka
Hamasaki had already put together a substantial resume in her
native Japan, taking wins over all-time great Yuka Tsuji and
UFC veteran Seo Hee Ham
twice. After those breakout wins put her on the map, the Megumi
Fujii pupil recorded W's against other stalwarts like Emi Fujino
and Mei
Yamaguchi, before taking the Invicta FC atomweight title from
Herica
Tiburcio in July 2015, then armbarring title challenger
Amber
Brown in March. Hamasaki has had success at both 105 and 115
pounds, and the only woman to ever defeat her is a fellow
pound-for-pounder in Claudia
Gadelha, a massive strawweight. Emerging 105-pound contender
Jinh Yu
Frey is the next likely challenger to Hamasaki's Invicta FC
title, but in the long term, it remains to be seen whether Hamasaki
will remain in the promotion or return to the strawweight division
for a UFC bid, which would mean more money and better opponents in
a stronger weight class, an opportunity she has vocalized her
interest in.